19 h 22 minAudiobook12 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the town you hope to change asks you to become someone else instead?
Carol Kennicott arrives in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with plans to make it more beautiful and alive. A bright young librarian newly married to country doctor Will Kennicott, she sees possibilities beyond its dusty road and plain buildings. But her hopes meet sharp gossip, settled habits and a polite refusal to welcome anything new.
In Main Street, Sinclair Lewis turns a sharp, sometimes sympathetic eye on a town and a marriage. Will is kind and hardworking, yet cannot understand Carol's unhappiness. Around them, clubs and neighbors enforce rules that rarely need saying aloud. Carol wants room for her education and imagination, but belonging may mean giving up too much of herself.
What you’ll discover
- A dream meets resistance Follow Carol's efforts to bring beauty and livelier conversation into a town wary of change.
- Kindness without understanding Explore a marriage where generosity and devotion do not close the distance between two people.
- The rules beneath politeness See how card clubs, dinner talk and gossip press people toward the same narrow expectations.
- Company outside the circle Meet Miles Bjornstam, whose blunt honesty offers Carol something different from the town's polite refusals.
- A heroine with rough edges Spend time with a woman who can be brave, silly, perceptive and mistaken by turns.
Who will love it
For readers who love satire, social portraits and one woman's struggle to live on her own terms, with a town, a marriage and the pressures of conformity at the heart of the story.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Carol dreams of remaking a town
- The town is smaller than her dream
- The town has rules, spoken and unspoken
- Her reforms meet a wall of polite refusal
- A marriage of kindness and distance
- Outsiders who show her what is possible
- What the book says about conformity
- A woman's place, and the price of wanting more
- How Lewis tells it, and why it stuck
Who’s who
- Carol KennicottA bright, idealistic young librarian who marries a doctor and moves to a prairie town, hoping to make it more beautiful and alive.
- Will KennicottCarol's husband, a respected and kindly country doctor, devoted to Gopher Prairie and unable to see why his wife is unhappy there.
- Vida SherwinA teacher and reformer who loves the town and believes in slow, polite improvement, sometimes a friend and sometimes a rival to Carol.
- Guy PollockA lawyer who loves books and old dreams, drawn to Carol, but long since worn down by the habits of the town.
- Miles BjornstamA blunt hired man and self-declared unbeliever who is shunned by the town and who speaks plainly with Carol.
- Bea SorensonA cheerful young woman of Scandinavian family, raised on a Minnesota farm, who comes to work in Carol's kitchen and finds her own place in the town.
- Erik ValborgA young tailor's assistant with artistic hopes, who seems to Carol a fellow dreamer in a town of practical men.
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- Audiobook
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- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Read and hear Main Street in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Main Street
by Sinclair Lewis · 1920
Carol Kennicott dreams of transforming Gopher Prairie, but the town's quiet refusal tests her sense of self.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Carol dreams of remaking a town
The story opens with Carol Milford, a young woman from Mankato, Minnesota. She has studied at Blodgett College and has read widely. She believes that villages can be made beautiful, and that she is the person to do it. For a time she trains as a librarian and works in the public library in St. Paul.
Carol is not a plain heroine. She is clever, warm and full of enthusiasm, but she is also vague. She loves the idea of reform more than she knows what reform needs. She talks about town planning, art and drama as if they were switches she could turn on. Lewis lets us like her and smile at her in the same breath.
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What is Main Street by Sinclair Lewis about?
It follows Carol Kennicott, who marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. She hopes to improve the town but meets gossip, habit and resistance, while her marriage and her sense of self are tested.
Is Gopher Prairie a real town?
No, Gopher Prairie is invented. Lewis based it on towns he knew, especially his hometown of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and meant it to stand for small towns across the American Midwest.
When was Main Street written and published?
Lewis published Main Street in 1920. It was an immediate success, helping make Lewis one of the leading American writers of his day.
The author
Sinclair Lewis
1885–1951 · American novelist
Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and the first writer from the United States to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Babbitt, his satire of small-city boosterism and middle-class conformity, added a new word to the American vocabulary.
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